NaGeira (3 page)

One day, when my uncle was with us, the sheriff arrived. He had come before but had been sent away by my mother. This time he was more successful, making it to the entranceway of the dining hall where my mother had received guests after the wake. He was a finely dressed gentleman who smelled of pomade. His grey eyes glistened with intensity when he talked about the Crown and taxes and such things that held no interest to me. I wanted my mother to tell him to leave, but she merely bowed her head. He seemed sharp like a bad-tempered fox as he snapped at her, in a voice far too loud, that if he left empty-handed the property and lands would be forfeit to the Crown.

Who was this man to threaten my mother? I thought. We had owned the house and the grounds for years now. Why did neither she nor my uncle tell him to leave? I put my hands over my ears and retreated to a corner.

Though tight-lipped and defiant, the sheriff had an anxious air. He fingered his hat and blinked too often, like a man trying to outface the sun. He and my uncle began to argue. Their voices were like barn doors banging in the wind, the same words repeated over and over with increased emphasis. But like a wind, the argument at last began to calm. It became a discussion. Glances were thrown at my mother and aunt who were sitting together by the window, my aunt weaving, my mother just staring through the glass. Before long the two men retreated to the study where, unbeknownst to them, I had escaped a moment earlier. Even though they thought they were alone their voices were still soft, just above a whisper. They need not have worried about me even if they had been aware I was crouched under my father’s old desk. I understood nothing of deeds, Crown rights, and commissions.

When the sheriff and my uncle left the room, I followed. I watched the sheriff give my mother a paper and tell her he would return the following week. If she could not make arrangements for the property’s transference to a suitable owner, he said, he would be forced to take possession. Then he looked meaningfully at my uncle who bent over and whispered quietly to her. He motioned his wife to join him, and told my mother he would return in a few days.

Mother continued to stare out of the window until they were long gone.

———

The next time we heard the grind of hooves on the pathway, it was neither my uncle nor the sheriff. My mother was at her place by the window. She turned sharply when she heard the sound and—I could hardly believe it—like a statue imbued with sudden life, she picked up her skirts and ran to the door.

At first I thought my father had returned. The soft voice of the man of the forest seemed to whisper in my ear once more. Was my father’s death merely a trick which could be righted? Was I like the child whose parent pretends to forget her birthday only so that he may sweep her from sorrow to dizzying joy in a moment? I remembered how my father’s eyes were still open even though everyone told me he was gone. If they are open, I had thought, then they can still see. And now it seemed I had been right all along!

I ran after my mother and held onto her skirts as she opened the door and leaned half-fainting against the entranceway. Afraid to look as the footsteps grew louder, I bit my lip and felt her lean forward. I opened my eyes to see her holding out her hands like two flowers to the rising sun.

It was not my father, but an English gentleman, Mr. Ridley. He had been to our house many times before and flown falcons with my father. My mother’s hands fell gently into his. I took in his alien scent—a rich, mysterious cocktail of man. A feather wavered in Mr. Ridley’s hat and his grey eyes fixed upon my mother so intently it seemed they would burn her through. I looked over his shoulder feeling this could not be all, that Father must be some way behind him.

———

Mr. Ridley was a widower. He must have been about forty years old but the lines on his face, as deep and unmoving as grooves in iron, made him seem much older. He was a landowner in the Pale but spent much of his time in England, where he made cannons, cannonballs, muskets, and bullets. He used to bring his weapons when he visited my father and they would go into the woods together to fire them at the trees or the birds. My father forbade me the woods whenever Mr. Ridley was staying. From the house I could hear the
crack-crack
of pistol fire and the collective shriek of scattering birds. I remembered wondering why men can never be peaceful, why their progress anywhere was always accompanied by gunfire or loud, mirthless laughter. I didn’t like Mr. Ridley and I didn’t like my father as much as usual when he was with Mr. Ridley. But the day when he came to our house to comfort my mother I had never before seen Mr. Ridley look so kind.

Mother and he were drinking each other in, their fingertips touching one another’s sleeves like hesitant petals. I was bursting with the riddle of my father yet afraid to speak.

A movement on the gravel near Mr. Ridley’s carriage distracted me. Someone else had alighted on the opposite side. My heart beat faster and, like a whirl of scattering butterflies, joy returned to my chest. But the butterflies ceased and crumbled into powder. It was Mr. Ridley’s son, Thomas. He gazed at me blankly with watery blue eyes while he gathered the horses’ reins and tied them to the tree stub by the path. I watched him, my chest still heaving, my senses still strewn on the gravel of the path. He was a tall, lean boy a couple of years older than me. He had red lips and long hair the colour of sand. I had seen him before and thought nothing; I could not tell why this time was so different, but it was. My heart was plummeting,
falling deeper and deeper into some black space with no bottom. Yet, even so, the sight of this boy—the way his Adam’s apple bulged as he unbridled the horses, the way his sandy hair waved in the breeze then flopped back down upon his head—set off some faint bell, some faraway cathedral peal whose sweetness held me suspended.

Nothing could erase my sorrow that Father would never return. Nothing could calm my disquiet at my mother’s excitement now upon seeing Mr. Ridley. But already, the boy before me had given me something to rival despair. Already, I feared less the black space through which my heart was falling. It seemed that grief might find a safer place to land.

A
knock on the door invades my dream. Shaking Thomas Ridley from me—his red lips, and watery eyes, his coarse, sandy hair and mossy odour—I turn on the straw and rise. The ten, twenty, thirty thousand days standing between Thomas Ridley and me scatter like grains of salt as my feet touch the floor. Only a faint light struggles through the single shutter in the wall, but I know it is morning. The fire is long out and I am chilled to the bone.

I stand with effort and reach for the shutter. Pulling it open by the iron hook to admit the morning, I hear the knock again and make my way to the door. I can already imagine David Butt shuffling his feet on the other side, frantic that the spell has not yet taken effect. I pull the door open at last and take a moment to adjust.

It’s not David. It’s Elizabeth Rose, Sara’s mother. Her eyes are alive with anxiety, her gaze darting down to the cove as
though she is afraid to be seen here. She is shrunken into herself like a woman seeking to be invisible, hands crossed in front of her waist. Before I have had time to back away, she steps over the threshold, giving one last furtive glance at the settlement below as she enters the shadow of my cabin.

“I need your help, Sheila,” she whispers.

My heart is racing. Does she know what I have done regarding David Butt and her daughter? Is Sara at this very moment lying in the arms of that unpromising youth, driving her mother here to make me untangle them?

“What? What’s happened?” I ask rather too suddenly.

Elizabeth glances at me and wets her bottom lip with her tongue. Her face seems reptilian in its small, rapid movements. She takes a step forward and reaches out her hand to touch my arm.

“Sheila, you’re the only one with the knowledge to help me.”

“What knowledge?” I ask rigid with guilt.

Elizabeth’s eyes soften into an appeal.

“Please,” she says. “You remember when Mary was born?”

“I remember.”

My heart begins to calm. This is clearly about something else.

“Do you remember Simon’s disappointment,” she asks, searching my face, “at not being given a son, I mean?”

“You
told
me about it, yes.”

I remember nothing first hand, I feel like saying, because I was not allowed to come near you, not during the worst time when you were stuck in your home. I nursed Elizabeth’s distemper only when she was strong enough to come to me. Even then, her husband, Simon Rose, would have stopped her visits had he known.

But I need not say it. Elizabeth turns from me, shamefaced, acknowledging the past. Her eyes scan my shelves and beams, the dry worms hanging from a nail, the stacks of juniper and spruce bark, the caribou moss, and the various small jars of feathers and dried innards. “Three times blessed, Sheila, and three times cursed,” she whispers. “Three daughters, no sons.” She pauses, shoulders hunched, looking to the floor. “I love my daughters, but they cannot carry on the work when Simon is too old. You’ve no idea how Simon frets about it. It is the curse of the Roses, he says, to wait in vain for a son.”

“And yet he came to his father and mother.”

“Late he came,” she murmurs, “late and in extraordinary circumstances.” She turns to face me suddenly. I have no idea what she can mean, so I wait for her to continue. “If we do not have a son,” she says, “there will be no one to take over. We’ll have to sell our boats for labour. We’ll lose our property and our standing.”

“Your girls can marry,” I suggest before I can stop myself. Is it David’s desperate passion that prompts my words? “Their husbands can be heirs along with your daughters.”

Elizabeth stares at me for a moment. Old as I am, my face burns.

“They must marry men of property. My husband is clear about that,” she says. “If not, the business will fritter away to nothing in a few generations.” She pauses. “We supply a grateful merchant in Bristol and my husband has written to him of our daughters.”

“He has sons, your merchant?”

“Five. Four as yet unmarried. My husband is hopeful. I am
not. Every man values his daughters as prizes. Women know more of the world. We have had to make do ourselves.”

I look to the floor for a moment. I have been called so many names signalling moral decay—hag, witch, old devil—but when my husband was alive, I honoured him. I was not making do. I am unsettled by this respectable woman’s cynicism and unsure what kind of help she is asking.

“I cannot prepare a love philtre to work between here and Bristol,” I say after a pause. “The distance is too great.”

“I am not thinking of husbands for my daughters now,” she replies. “I’m thinking of a son for myself. I am with child.”

She holds her palm to her belly and gives me a twitchy smile.

“Simon doesn’t know it yet. No one does. When I tell him he will pace the floor night and day. He will gaze at my bulging stomach wondering, hoping. The house will cease to sleep and the very walls will tingle with worry and anticipation.”

“What do you need from me?” I ask.

She springs forward and grabs my hand. “You must ensure it is a boy,” she says. Before I can pull back, she has drawn my palm into her stomach. I can feel a small swelling.

“Can you tell?” she asks, her eyes bulging with worry. “Can you tell the sex?”

“It’s sex isn’t decided yet,” I tell her. “I can make a draft to bring out the man in your unformed child. Please.”

I pull away and motion her towards my bed. She backs away and sits patiently while I move over to the medicine jars upon my shelves. I feel her expectation tickling my ears like moths’ wings. I reach up to the top shelf and lay my fingers on a jar perched on the edge.

———

A mist rises from the forest floor, though it hardly rained last night. Everything drips—the mushrooms, the rough bark, and the little twigs that catch me as I pass. New buds open like yellowy-green lips parting, yearning for the kiss of the sun. It is the season of universal growth. Birds fly from tree to tree sensing the changes around them and the under-life of the woods scurries about my feet.

I am afraid my physic will not work with Elizabeth Rose. Her need is too great, as is her trust in me. I steeped the goat’s testicle in water and made her drink the fluid. This is the accepted cure, yet I feel her curse may be stronger. And if it proves so, if a baby girl emerges from between her legs, I will be denounced as a charlatan by the most important family in the settlement and one of the most influential in the whole Bristol plantation. And if the boy David gets his wish and Sara swoons for him, Elizabeth Rose and her husband will have double reason for choler. So I am here, in the place I feel safest, the place that once promised me eternal welcome. I repeat to myself the words the man of the forest whispered to me:
While the woods embrace you, no spirit or beast can harm you, no strangers or neighbours smite you, no dank ague infect you. When death lies all around you, the leaves and boughs protect you.

Why do the people of this place always settle by the coast? Are they too foolish to turn around and see what’s behind them? The forest is warmer and carries fewer dangers. And life abounds here. Mushrooms grow in a single night, moths and flies appear
and attract birds which can feed us. In a few months there will be berries too, and nature will bask in plenty. But the planters here have forgotten how to live on the land, if they ever knew. They have come here on the sea to fish upon the sea. Once settled, they look out to the ocean and turn their backs on nature’s stores.

One day they will make maps of this place as they do in England and Ireland. The settlements will show like spiders couching along the ragged coastline while the interior remains a naked, unexplored blank. When I am ill and ready to die, I shall go down to the water where I have no protection. The forest cannot harm me, this I know too well. It eases every sorrow and soothes every pain. When I have had enough of it all, I will turn my back on this protection. I will expose myself to the wretched, heaving ocean. I will let its waves enfold me and pull me to its icy heart. People here have it wrong. The ocean is for the dying, not for the living.